1 Introduction

Welcome to ConVirt for Hyper-V. ConVirt is a multi-platform solution for managing your virtualization and cloud infrastructure, including VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, and more. ConVirt enables you to manage thousands of hosts and virtual machines throughout their full lifecycle in a highly scalable and secure fashion, with advanced automation and orchestration features such as high availability, backup and recovery, policy-based workload management, and quota-managed self-service.

This document is a step-by-step guide for setting up a small "learning" environment to deploy ConVirt and try out its features. The steps are simple:

Two 1-Gbps network interfaces - one for management and another for creating VMs on an isolated network

Using Hyper-V Manager, make sure that each physical NIC has a corresponding switch (see diagram below). In this guide we will use the following naming:

the External switch on the Management NIC is "hv-switch0"

the External switch on the VM NIC is "vm-switch0".

Supported Operating Systems

Fresh install of one of these

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 R2

Note - PowerShell remoting needs to be enabled on these hosts

Hypervisor

Hyper-V

2.2 Storage

Non-shared (local) storage

Note: ConVirt supports a broad set of shared storage options, but this requires a Hyper-V host cluster, which is beyond the scope of this guide.

2.3 Network

Internet access - you will need Internet access during your ConVirt setup, as some of the packages are downloaded over the network.

Domain access - make sure that both hosts are members of the same domain

Firewall - the firewall needs to allow a tcp connection on port 8080 for the proxy server

2.3.1 Self Service Option

In order to create self-service Virtual Data Centers, ConVirt transforms existing virtualized infrastructure into a cloud by overlaying an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer. To manage this layer, you need to set up several network resources:

Network Service - one additional VM to be used as a network service (with Ubuntu 12.04 or CentOS 5.x/6.x). This VM will have connectivity to

This will bring up a new dialog, select Environments button and in the system variables, select PATH variable. Press the Edit.. button.

Append the path for vmconnect.exe (the one containing WinSxS ) at the end. To do so, scroll to end, add a semi-colon (;) and the path.

Press ok/apply to save the changes.

To test this configuration, open a command windows or type "cmd /c" from powershell

echo %PATH% and make sure that the path you appended shows up.

Restart the browser(s)

3 Setting Up ConVirt

ConVirt manages Hyper-V hosts via a proxy machine. The ConVirt Management Server (CMS) talks to the proxy via http/https, and the proxy talks to the Hyper-V hosts using PowerShell.

Because we are setting up a simple "learning" environment, we will install the ConVirt Management System (CMS) and proxy as virtual machines on Host A, rather than on their own dedicated servers. The physical and virtual deployment architecture is shown in the diagram below:

4 The ConVirt Management Console

The ConVirt Management Console is a web-based dashboard that provides a single point of management and visibility into of your entire virtualized environment. ConVirt is multi-user, allowing the same environment to be managed by multiple administrators, and extensible, with multiple hooks for enterprise integration including LDAP/AD support, CLI, and API-based approaches.

Now that you have set up your hosts and installed the CMS and proxy, you are ready to log in to the ConVirt Management Console to start managing your virtualization environment.
Open the ConVirt Management Console in your Firefox browser:

http://<appliance-ip-address>:8091/

The default application credentials are :

user : admin

password : admin

The Console has 3 basic elements:

A. Navigation Pane
B. Detail Tabs
C. Task Pane

4.1 Navigation Pane

This pane displays an organized, hierarchical view of each entity managed by the system, including Data Centers (Server Pools, Hosts, VMs, and Templates), Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds (IaaS), and Virtual Data Centers (Self Service). ConVirt has a highly interactive interface that allows you to use a context-sensitive menu on any entity to invoke the appropriate operations. For example, if you select a VM, you can right mouse click to get to the context menu and invoke the desired operations.

4.2 Detail Tabs

Each entity in the system has at least an Overview tab and a Configuration tab, and if appropriate, a Servers tab. The Overview tab shows summary information as well as information that requires attention. It also shows various charts that shows recent performance.

4.3 Task Pane

All operations within ConVirt are carried out via the task engine subsystem. It runs periodic tasks of monitoring hosts and virtual machines, data rollups and periodic maintenance. Information about the tasks submitted and their status is presented in the task pane at the bottom.

5 Adding Managed Hosts

When you first open ConVirt, you're faced with an empty Data Center. But with ConVirt's agentless architecture, bringing your virtualization hosts under management is a very simple discovery process. Just create a new server pool, then point to the hosts in your environment you want to add to the pool:

5.1 Create A Server Pool

Server pools allow you to manage a set of hosts in a uniform fashion, including shared storage, network resources, and automation policies.

In the Navigation pane, right click on the Data Center and select "Add Server Pool"

6.1 Create A Template

A template is a set of related configuration information from which you can create one or more virtual machines. ConVirt ships with a set of default templates geared towards doing an ISO install, and can be easily customized to your environment.

First, lets create a template you can use with your Hyper-V environment. We're going to do this by cloning and modifying an existing template:

Select the Template Library

Drill down to the HyperV Templates group

Right click on the template and select "Create Like":

Enter a new name of the template and click OK.

You should see the new template show up in the HyperV Templates group.

Right click on the new template, and select Edit Settings.

A Template Settings dialog box should pop up that will guide you through the process of editing the template. In the General section, change the default values to match your virtual machine template. For example, you can change the memory or change the number of virtual CPUs. In this example, we will create a Windows 8 virtual machine template.

For "Guest OS Flavor", select "Windows"

For "Guest OS Name", select "Windows 8"

For "Guest OS Version", select "SP2"

Next we'll modify the template to use an ISO file to create new virtual machines, rather than the physical cdrom device.

Select Storage, and select the /cdrom storage disk. Note that the template uses some variables to identify the location and name of the ISO file to use:

Select Template Parameters and enter the ISO location and file name for your environment:

Next you will identify the switch to use to connect the VM. Select the Networks tab, select the Default Network, and select Edit.

Enter the name of the switch you want to connect the virtual machine to. e.g. VM-switch0, and click Save.

Press OK. We just created a template that is suitable for provisioning multiple virtual machines in your environment.

6.2 Provision A Virtual Machine

Now that you have created your template, you can use it to provision a new virtual machine. There are several ways to provision a VM:

Provision on a server pool

Provision on a specific host

Provision from a template as the starting point

For this example, we will provision a VM on one of our host servers:

Right click on the host, and select Provision Virtual Machine

Select the virtual machine template you just created in the last section, and give the VM a name:

VM: hyperv-001 (or insert your own name here)

Click OK to provision the VM.

You should see the new VM show up in the Navigation page under your Hyper-V host server.

6.3 Start & Connect To Your Virtual Machine

Now that you have provisioned your VM, you can start it, connect to it, and use it. And you can do all this from the ConVirt console: